Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter
| Solution Summary Development Dimensions International, Inc. (DDI) has been helping hundreds of organizations around the world―including half of the Fortune 500 companies―close the gap between where their businesses need to go and the talent they must have to take them there. With associates in 42 offices in 26 countries, the company’s expertise includes designing and implementing employee selection systems and identifying and developing talent, from front-line workers to executive leadership. As DDI continued to grow, it experienced escalating costs associated with searching, storing, and recreating critical, expense-related documents for its operations around the globe. They implemented Oracle Internet Expenses and integrated a new document-capture solution based on Oracle WebCenter Imaging, that enabled the company to overcome the limitations of its legacy system with an open, enterprise architecture that facilitates a flexible deployment. DDI cut
administrative costs associated with managing paper-based transactions,
as well as operational costs associated with photocopying, faxing, and
couriering documents and decreased its physical
storage requirements & costs. DDI
estimates that it is saving the equivalent of one full-time staff member
in IT management. In
addition, the company gained the ability to track, access, and manage
information more efficiently to assist with regulatory compliance
related to information protection and privacy. |
Company Overview
Business Challenges
The company previously used a third-party system to manage employee expenses, a solution that was extremely complex to maintain, as it was not built on a standards-based architecture. As DDI continued to grow, it experienced escalating costs associated with searching, storing, and recreating critical, expense-related documents for its operations around the globe. Every year, employees spent thousands of hours and the company expended significant financial resources distributing client-billable expense receipts across several departments globally. This largely manual system delayed employee reimbursement and client billing and prohibited the rollout of shared services centers, designed to elevate efficiency and customer service.
To address these challenges, DDI defined following business objectives:
- Advance DDI’s global, shared services strategy to help it to reduce costs, improve administrative efficiency, and expand its ability to deliver world-class talent acquisition and development services
- Enable the company to more efficiently capture and process employee expenses, eliminating manual processes and accelerating reimbursement, as well as customer billing
- Reduce IT complexity and management costs by eliminating custom integrations between the company’s business-critical applications and systems
DDI implemented Oracle Internet Expenses to accelerate
expense report submission, approval, processing, and payment, and
control expenses with flexible audit tools. The solution automated the
approval workflow and accelerated and ensured accurate expense
attribution in client invoices.
At the same time, DDI implemented a new document-capture solution. It deployed Oracle WebCenter Imaging,
a solution that enabled the company to overcome the limitations of its
legacy system with an open, enterprise architecture that facilitates a
flexible deployment. As part of the rollout, it integrated Oracle
WebCenter Imaging with Oracle Internet Expenses. Oracle WebCenter
Imaging operates as an infrastructure-supporting solution, as opposed to
an application unto itself—so the company can leverage it as a shared
service that extends wherever imaging is required throughout the
enterprise.
We are very pleased with the way Oracle WebCenter Imaging enabled us to achieve process efficiencies by capturing receipt images up front and making them accessible to managers and other approvers all along the workflow. We also like that we can retrieve images not only from Oracle Internet Expenses, but also from Oracle Payables, as well as within Oracle WebCenter Imaging itself. Mike Fieldhammer, Corporate Controller, Development Dimensions International |
- DDI Customer Snapshot
- DDI Customer Video
- Oracle WebCenter Content
- Oracle WebCenter Imaging
- Oracle WebCenter Capture
- Oracle Internet Expenses